Same
Old Story: Film at Eleven

THE
MORE THINGS CHANGE.....

Over the last
few weeks a realization has been trickling down into the dimmer reaches of the
US media. It is a realization that a specter is haunting Europe, the specter
of Greater Albania. There is much open shock and dismay  now  that
our little pals, the Albanian guerrillas, are becoming a problem to the self-appointed
outside forces of order; well, not "our" little pals so much as NATO’s,
Tony Sheep Shooting, Cow-Punching Blair’s, and the US political-military elite’s
willing, er, helpers.

I say this with
little partisanship since I was among those who didn’t favor taking sides in
this overseas sideshow to start with. Those who expect to lose land to Greater
Albania will of course be opposed to the project. Sorting this out was never
our job in principle but now Uncle has managed to create a situation for himself,
let us call it a misunderstanding. "No, no, no. That’s not the secret
map we agreed to! It’s this one over here – with not quite so much Albania in
it."

Somehow it seems
as if it’s already happened before: dejà vu, which is French for
"been there, done that, didn’t like it." On the record, US policy
makers are often shocked and surprised when their policies turn out badly. They
are so good at it as to rate some kind of Nobel Prize. The press is even more
shockable when disaster strikes after they’ve shilled for some scam for months
or years.

HISTORICAL ANALOGY,
PATTERN, AND UNIQUE EVENTS

The pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus went around saying that you can’t step in the same river
twice. With all that water and sand rushing by all the time, the key word is
"same." The river looks the same, but it’s actually different water
molecules, even if Heraclitus didn’t think in terms of molecules. Actually,
he said panta rhei, "everything flows," even if this program
won’t let me do the accents correctly.

I feel personally
close to this problem on grounds of etymology. Greek
rhei
derives from reconstructed Indo-European *srew-/srow-/sru- (the different
vowels are ablaut grades). Hence Sanskrit srávati, "it flows."
In Proto-Germanic a "t" was inserted for ease of pronunciation, whence
the noun form *straumaz: Gothic straums, German Strom,
Swedish ström, English stream. In the midst of some state-strengthening
wars, Swedish bureaucrats decided that for purposes of taxing and conscripting
it would be better for people to have stable last names, instead of Sven Knutsson’s
son being Einar Svensson and his son being Erik Einarsson, and so on.

I’m not sure this
"reform" has caught on yet in Iceland. But last names became all the
go in Sweden and elsewhere, and sundry words for land features, occupations,
etc., were added into the relatively limited number of classical and Biblical
names popular in the northland. So ström got to be a name element,
combined with such fitting terms as lund, qvist, berg,
and others. Then most of the Swedes of any real character took off for North
America. The results are not in yet, although renting Fargo may be of
some help.

It was an involved
historical process. Strom Thurmond and I are very grateful. It would be terrible
to be named Magnús. But that’s quite enough Ionian philosophy and comparative
linguistics. The point was that some things change and that, despite Heraclitus,
some things don’t change that much. US officials’ constant refrain of being
surprised when their heroic allies turn out badly is one of the latter.

QUAGMIRE GAP
AND OLD RIGHT LAG THEORY

This brings us
to the Quagmire Gap. Not too long ago, claims were made that US/NATO intervention
and philanthropy might lead to some Good Nations getting bogged down beyond
their intentions in the country of the Bad. Cynics suggested on this very website
that intervening in other people’s wars is not an exact science. We were met
with much scepticism.

This is much like
the Old Right’s problem of appearing to cry Wolf by announcing that this or
that New Deal policy would end poorly. When the disasters failed to appear for
ten or twenty years, the Old Right was held to have been wrong. The disasters
have of course appeared, but the timing was the tricky part. We might think
of the last twenty or so years as the Era of Chickens Coming Home to Roost.
It appears, however, that in foreign affairs the Piper comes around for early
payment.

AGUINALDO UNDER
THREE FLAGS (TWO OF WHICH ‘FLEW OVER’ SLAVERY AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER)

An interesting
example concerns the relationship between US policy makers and Philippine revolutionaries
in 1898, the very year in which the overseas US empire was born. It is not an
exact parallel with any later situation, but it does illustrate the regular
pitfalls. The shifting role of local "allies" is instructive.

To be very brief,
as war loomed between the US and Spain in early 1898, US officials anticipated
victory, naturally enough, but also foresaw themselves coming into some new
territorial possessions in the Pacific, which Spain could be forced to cede.
Given their interest in a neo-mercantilist push into Asian markets – the Open
Door – they became quite keen on having Manila harbor in the Philippine Islands.

As in Cuba, an
intermittent nationalist revolt was under way in the Philippines, led by revolutionaries
from the ilustrado class (persons of education and property). A few years
earlier, Spanish officials had tried to buy the rebel leaders off with a large
payment of pesos, half of it up front. When these leaders used the money to
buy firearms in Hong Kong, the Spaniards came to doubt their reliability and
never made the second payment.

Well aware of
the Philippine rebels’ potential usefulness in a war with Spain, US representatives
at Hong Kong led Emiliano Aguinaldo and other revolutionary spokesmen to believe
that the United States was sincerely interested in helping their cause. The
rebels, who had already issued a Declaration of Independence the previous November,
logically saw themselves as allies, once the Spanish-American War began.

Admiral Dewey’s
fleet easily sunk the antiquated Spanish fleet off Manila on May 1. But with
only 10,000 US soldiers available against 20,000 Spaniards, the 14,000 Filipino
insurgents looked very useful indeed. As luck would have it, the land battle
of Manila was brief, fought on August 31, just long enough to save the Spanish
officers’ honor. Thereafter, US and Filipino forces occupied differing sectors
surrounding Manila and eyed one another warily.

Secretary of State
William R. Day was having misgivings: "To obtain the unconditional personal
assistance of General Aguinaldo… was proper, if in so doing he was not induced
to form hopes which it might not be practicable to gratify."1
A fallback position was being readied, or perhaps the consul at Hong Kong and
Dewey in Manila had pragmatically offered more than Washington wanted them to.
Deniability is a wonderful thing.

The Philippine
rebels wished to believe that the great liberal Republic had providentially
needed their help as allies in a war which otherwise had little to do with their
country. The US authorities wanted some room in which to decide just how much
of the island chain they needed to annex. The internationally salonfähig
powers, Spain and the United States, would decide the fate of the Philippines.
Under international law there was no point in consulting the Tagalog-speaking
rabble.

TWO WARS FOR
THE PRICE OF ONE

Of course these
two viewpoints could not be reconciled. On February 4, 1899, shots fired between
Filipino and US forces led to a full-scale battle with casualties on both sides.
Thus began the Philippine-American War, which the US in an inherited Indian-fighting
jargon called the Philippine Insurrection.

I shall not burden
the reader with the 200,000 Filipino deaths from all causes relating to the
war – battlefield deaths, massacre, disease, disruption of food production –
other than to mention them. The war became a classical colonialist counter-insurgency
of the sort Spain had been waging in Cuba, when the US went to war with Spain.
In due course, the US prevailed but at a cost in lives and treasure several
times the costs of the war with that country.

As the fighting
continued, Philippine representative Agoncillo sent six memos to the US Senate
stating the legal position. In one of these he wrote: "Secretaries of State
of your country (including Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Pinckney) have denied the right
of an ally of America to acquire by conquest from Great Britain any American
territory while America was struggling for independence…. We deny similarly
the right of the United States to acquire Philippine territory by cession from
Spain while the Filipinos were yet at war with that power."2

A pretty good
argument, to be sure, but great powers hate it when their own precedents are
quoted against them, and Agoncillo got no response. By 1902, Teddy Roosevelt,
now President, ended the war by proclaiming it was "over." Having
taken the islands by cession from Spain and payment to that power, the US regarded
the whole thing as an internal matter on US territory. You don’t negotiate with
rebels.

LONG-RUN HAPPY
ENDING INTERRUPTED BY THIRD EMPIRE

So the islands
became America’s India. By the late 1930s, interest-group politics had paved
the way for Philippine independence. Sugar and other interests resented Filipinos’
exemption from tariff restrictions. As an independent nation, the Philippines’
producers would be subject to them.

Then came the
US-Japanese War (a subset of a larger catastrophe) and displacement for several
years of US colonialists by Japanese colonialists. The old nationalist general
Aguinaldo collaborated quite happily with the Japanese, as did many other Filipinos
who had collaborated with the Americans and, before them, with Spain. Interestingly,
wartime collaborators suffered little loss of prestige later. The Filipinos
had learned that you collaborate with the occupying power, until the next one
comes along.

I won’t rub it
in. Picking sides in foreign quarrels is tricky. Allies are fickle and have
their own agendas. Fighting for or against Greater Albania may be in some Americans’
interest. I doubt it’s in the interest of the American people, broadly conceived.

Notes

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